Why 100 million monthly Cortana users on Windows 10 is a big deal

During the company’s fourth quarter earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped a bomb on us that’s arguably bigger than any figure touted since the release of Windows 10.”The Cortana search box [in the Windows 10 task bar] has over 100 million monthly active users, with 8 billion questions asked to date,” Nadella stated plainly on the call.Now, the Redmond campus chief didn’t specify exactly how many of those users are using Cortana on the desktop with their voice or simply typing into the search box, but how much does that matter? Regardless of their method – granted, 100 million vocal users would go a long way to improve the virtual assistant’s voice recognition – a lot of users are tapping into Cortana’s cloud-powered knowledge graph and machine learning, which…